


On the other side

by queen_ypolita



Category: Return to Night - Mary Renault
Genre: Community: trope_bingo, F/M, Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-28
Updated: 2013-10-28
Packaged: 2017-12-30 18:38:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1022063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queen_ypolita/pseuds/queen_ypolita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the war, Hilary looks back on everything that threatened her relationship with Julian in the past few years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the other side

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the "against all odds" square on my trope_bingo card.

Coming home from a late-night house call, Hilary found Julian stretched out on the threadbare sofa in the living-room, with baby Anne sleeping on his chest, and her heart felt so full of happiness that she hadn't always believed she could have in the long, hard years since they got married, with herself and Julian mostly apart and risking their lives. 

*  
She thought she was used to the gossips but the first few months after their marriage she couldn't enter a room or walk into a shop without the conversation coming to an evident lull. Against the background of the usual drone of voices, there were always sharp whispers going on somewhere behind her back. 

And there were frequent glances at her midsection, commonly assumed to be the cause for the hasty nuptials. She did her best to keep up a good cheer, but it didn't come easy. 

Then the war started, and people suddenly had other things on their mind.

*  
Without the injuries, Hilary thought Julian's career in the RAF—and his life—could have been much shorter. After few months of war, there weren't many left of Julian's original squadron, and after some more months, Julian was one of three left of the squadron that the survivors of his original one had joined. 

At the time, each injury had felt frightening, but none of them had been either life-threatening or something that forced him out of the RAF completely: each had meant a couple of months of healing and ground duties, and then Julian was flying again. 

*  
She knew Julian was never anything but completely open about Tallis. It was a brief, intense relationship, born out of the relentless pressures and sheer intensity of living on the edge where you lived and died with the others in your unit, who were the only people who could possibly understand everything you were going through, who saved your life one day and were killed in a heartbeat the next. 

Rationally, emotionally, she fully understood, and she made sure Julian felt she was supportive. But the flare of jealousy she felt when Julian glowed talking about him left a scar. 

*  
When she had trained, she had never expected to work in London, at least not until attitudes changes considerably, but as with many other aspects of life, the war had temporarily pushed many sorts of scruples aside. She worked nights with ambulance crews, some of them women too, stumbled in rabble and crawled into bomb-hit houses, binding wounds, strapping bones, trying to keep as many Londoners alive as possible. Every time she went out when bombs were falling she thought she would die that night, but the next morning she was always somehow alive, a little more worn, but alive.

*  
She had thought she was too thin and probably too old to just fall pregnant after the two-day period of leave Julian had in the last months of the war—both of them so tired and worn than doing anything but hold each other and sleep felt like too much effort—and besides her work kept so busy she frequently lost track of her periods. As it happened, she didn't realise she had been pregnant until it was all over. It was devastating; she couldn't help thinking all hope for her and Julian was now gone.


End file.
